Erupting Volcanoes
Fiery Voices
from the Cold North
by Francesco Chiaro
Active ever since 1998, Stamsund Theatre Festival can very well be considered a reference in the Norwegian performing arts scene. Nestled in a small fishing village in the Lofoten islands, way up in the northern regions of the Scandinavian country, the Festival opens up a brief window onto the world of puppet and visual theatre -but also on contemporary performing arts-, inviting renowned and experimental companies to showcase their works for a local and not-so local audience. This year’s edition of the Festival, directed once again by Thorbjørn Gabrielsen, offers more than 10 performances, along with seminars, artist talks and other networking events, all in the space of just one week.
In spite of its “unprivileged” location on a map, Stamsund Theatre Festival does not give in to the gravitational pull of the centre. On the contrary, by welcoming to the periphery of Europe a whole array of strong and emancipated female voices, the festival’s artistic direction shines a light on the systemic misogyny that has been shaping the land we walk on for so many centuries, giving space for the margins to reclaim bodies and territories.
And nothing screams “feminist enfranchisement” more loudly than Johanna Holt Kleive, Victoria Fredrikke Schou Røising and Nikoline Spjelkavik’s Witch Club Satan, the closing act of the Festival – and the opening one for this review.
Witch Club Satan by Lost and Found productions
[Saturday 27 May 2023, Frysa-Hurtigrutekaia – Stamsund, Norway]
«Witch Club Satan is a feminist, occult black metal performance in four acts – a musical dramatic ritual with unknown consequences. Witch Club Satan is a primal scream and artistic extremism. In this performance, Victoria Røising (bass), Johanna Holt Kleive (drums) and Nikoline Spjelkavik (guitar) cultivate the theatricality of infamous Norwegian black metal, and draw the traditional expression in a divine feminine direction».
Ph. by Helge Brakke
Even though accusations of witchery, diabolism and heresy abounded in mediaeval ages, systematic prosecutions and executions of female “witches” flared up only after the beginning of the 16th Century, leading to the trials that eventually caused the death of hundreds of thousands of women worldwide. As the mainstream narrative goes, the hunts were spurred mainly by the spread of Christianity in Western Europe and its subsequent takeover of Paganism, with its tribal, anthropomorphic gods and goddesses and natural, magical phenomena. However, in Caliban and the Witch first and in Witches, Witch-Hunting and Women after, scholar, teacher and feminist activist Silvia Federici argues that, from 1500 onwards, the Church used its power and significance to kill women, yes, but for political reasons – and not religious.
Indeed, within the efforts of the State to reform society (however disguised as Christian ideology), rural communities were disciplined into a new hierarchy that centralised power to the king, priests and local judges – all noticeably male-dominated positions. This new society, according to Federici, was the starting point of Capitalism as we know it today, in which poor people were left behind and eventually criminalised. It is worth remembering that when the shift from subsistence to monetary economy was imposed, only men were entitled to receive payment, thus giving rise to the marginalisation of women’s labour from the economical and political realms of the society.
As a matter of fact, it is in this period that labour first became divided by sex, with women’s value reduced to housebound, earthbound childbearing. The female body became a means of reproduction of labour power, a “work machine” devoted to the reproduction of a now extremely necessary workforce. Witch hunts, then, were used as a way to weaken the resistance of the peasantry and rural communities that suffered under the new state policies, which lead to land privatisation, increased taxation and an augmented control over virtually every aspect of social and private life – a life that, before this «Great Transformation», was based on a strong communal organisation in which women withheld a wide knowledge on healing plants, conception, birth, birth control and even abortion. What was once a life-sustaining role, quickly became a demonic force posing a threat not only towards the Church’s ideology on fertility, but also to the State interests and its new mechanical paradigm.
It is no coincidence then, that, under this new status quo, the reproductive force of the population was directly controlled by putting under State control the practice of midwifery, to the direct detriment of all those midwives (or, as Federici likes to call them, «wise women») who remained in practice regardless of the new civil legislations and were thus often accused of witchery whenever stillborn births and malformations in babies occurred (the surge in syphilis and syphilitic dementia, which targeted mostly women and were responsible for both pre-natal mortality and cognitive decline, of course, was never burned at the stake).
Five-hundred years later, little has changed: the institutionalisation of sexism, lookism and classism initiated with the witch hunts still haunts our society to this day, putting on the margins of the accepted spectrum of normality and eventually killing through more covert means whoever falls outside of the gendered, productive and reproductive expectations of the capitalistic, patriarchal project. Within this context, then, what Witch Club Satan (the latest creation of Norwegian theatre company Lost and Found productions) does is to take back the centuries of violence inscribed on the bodies of so many women, reclaiming the frightening, subversive power that “witches” were (and still are) associated with and brilliantly returning it to the audience through the incendiary energy and occult aesthetics of black metal.
Renowned for its long-established ties with misogyny, violence and machismo (not to mention its more recent neo-Nazi, neo-fascist and white-supremacist outbursts), the world of Heavy metal music and its plentiful subgenres can still be quite the inclusive place – and women have been involved in it ever since its inception. In spite of the many attempts at demonising and prohibiting the genre, then, what this onslaught of sound and raw imagery really represents is a cry of rebellion against all sorts of oppressive structures, and in the capable hands of the Norwegian trio, this cry turns into a liberating, primal scream for justice and equality.
«Witch Club Satan is a concert, a theatre performance, a high mass service, and a climate summit» all mustered into a sleek and very explicit four-part act about self-directed feminine power and self-sovereignty. By mixing excerpts from the most well-known treatise on witchcraft, the Malleus Maleficarum, with original, scathing lyrics, Johanna Holt Kleive, Victoria Fredrikke Schou Røising and Nikoline Spjelkavik take us on a telluric journey through the gruesome repression faced by «luminescent girls» whose only crime was to pose a «threat to anyone who denied their lights». Vomiting mouthfuls of rage and disdain, the three priestesses ask their audience to «trust that the witches want you and the world to be well, and that the time we have together will be a profound celebration».
As a matter of fact, in this «musical, dramatic ritual of unknown effect», what resonates louder than any righteous disgust with war, environmental pillage, religious morality and gender-based violence is the love-filled, feminist call «to expand. To be more. To be more woman. All together». Filling their mouths with the sounds of air, earth, water and fire, the three performers call not for a revenge, but a liberation by eruption: «We are done kissing the ass of the devil/We are here to lick the masks off of our sisters’ faces».
And erupt they do, all the while succeeding in their effort to «make experimental theatre more inviting for [and more accessible to] a broader audience», thus turning Witch Club Satan into an extremely powerful, explosive piece of political art. As American novelist Ursula K. Le Guin said in her 1986 Bryn Mawr College Commencement address, «I know that many men and even women are afraid and angry when women do speak, because in this barbaric society, when women speak truly they speak subversively - they can't help it: if you're underneath, if you're kept down, you break out, you subvert. We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains». And indeed, as we walk out of the concert with buzzing ears, some of us notice new elevations on the horizon.
Moving to the other side of theatre, the one with life-sized puppets, black-clad, invisible stagehands and endless possibilities, the second show in this review defiantly goes beyond genre, «fearlessly crossing the borders of other artistic expressions». As a matter of fact, and in the own words of Plexus Polaire’s director Yngvild Aspeli, «puppetry is not only a form, it is a way of seeing the world, a language, a state of mind», and judging by the wows and ohs bubbling up among the audience, it is also (and still, whatever some may say) a very stimulating experience.
Dracula by Plexus Polaire
[from May 23 to May 24, 2023, Frysa-Hurtigrutekaia – Stamsund, Norway]
«In her visual adaptation of the famous myth of Dracula, Yngvild Aspeli chooses to freely draw inspiration from the story of Bram Stoker to focus more particularly on women. The show thus focuses on the experience of the character of Lucy – and her fight against her inner demon embodied by Dracula, who then represents domination, dependence, addiction to a destructive force. A metaphor of control, both forced and desired, seductive and deceptive. The audience embarks on an intimate and psychic journey, in this phantasmagorical universe that Lucy has built for herself, in which she has plunged and against which she fights.»
Ph. by João Catarino
Placing itself at the intersection between the physical and the psychic, Dracula «freely draws inspiration from the story of Bram Stoker to focus more particularly on women», making of Lucy Westenra (the Count’s first English victim in the novel) its narrative and declaratory core, thus prismatically multiplying and refracting her active -and reactive- female perspective. With a fantastic array of technical ingenuity and devices at its disposal, the French-Norwegian company puts together a barrage of jaw-dropping sequences that, slickly and smoothly, steer spectators amidst the figurative waters of Lucy’s inner fight with «domination, dependence and addiction to a destructive force».
Thanks to a fine-tuned, meticulous group effort that does not shy away from amalgamating handicrafts with digital projections, Plexus Polaire flexes its visual muscles to the delight of Stamsund’s audience, conjuring up a labyrinthine mindscape where every human gesture is mirrored by a mechanical one, misdirecting us so many times that we no longer know who controls who – and who’s sucking who dry, both technically and metaphorically.
Moreover, by reading the eldritch tale of the Voivode of Wallachia through the informed lenses of feminism, Aspeli quickly dispels the fascination held by this conquering, impaling, raping and murdering “prince”, thus presenting it for the beast that he actually was. Indeed, and albeit translated into the ethereal language of visual theatre, the gore and blood and dismemberment operated by Vlad as a mean to asserting his authority are all there, scaring spectators and predestined victims alike. But Dracula is a story of self-affirmation in which the hunter becomes the hunted and historical scores are evened, if only for a night. He may be the manipulative, dependence-creating monster of the title, but the actual main character of the performance is Lucy – along with all the Lucies who, alone or together, have to face this representation of male domination both in fiction and in real life.
And male domination -albeit on a much larger, more systemic scale- is also present in the following show, an ode to sexual exploration and self-discovery in the age of heteronormativity.
Falla/Solo by Julia B. Laperrière
[Wednesday 24 May 2023, Teater NOR – Stamsund, Norway]
«Second to last in the series of performances dished up for this review, Canadian artist Julia B. Laperrière’s Falla/Solo “offers an invitation to playfulness, an incursion in the in-between that puts forth a vision of female sexuality that is alternative — mutating perhaps — liberated and unashamed”».
Ph. by Dorothea Tuch
Calling on the transformative power of a strap-on dildo first worn -and felt- a few summers ago, Laperrière opens a discussion on gender identity, reminding us that there is no such thing as the body, but rather a continuous bodying in and on which power dynamics and social structures act fiercely – and often unsungly. Generous in its premise and joyfully refreshing in its various dickwalks, Falla/Solo makes for an interesting and destabilising verbal and choreutic proposal, especially if placed in a virtual conversation with Paul B. Preciado’s Countersexual Manifesto.
Published in 2000, Preciado’s text is an outrageous yet rigorous work of trans theory, but also an insistent call to action. In it, the philosopher, curator and transgender activist claims that in the history of sexuality the artifice, and not nature, comes first – in the beginning was the dildo, one might say. «The dildo is the truth of the genitals as a signifying mechanism against which the penis looks like the false impostor of a dominant ideology. The dildo says the penis is a fake phallus. The dildo shows that the signifier generated by sexual difference has gotten caught in its own trap. It will be betrayed by the very logic that established it, and all under the pretext of imitation of compensation for an impairment of a mere prosthetic supplement».
Animated by this theoretical short-circuit, Falla/Solo dances with the heterocentric social contract, offering up a vibrant example of how to dismantle it through pleasure, experimentation and lots of unashamed joy. Indeed, as soon as the dildo joins forces with the female body, a new energy takes over the performer’s body, who is ever so lightly disturbed by some hints of machismo before discovering a new and hilarious set of movements and behaviours - a new, hybrid language that goes well beyond the limits of binarism and phallogocentrism, thus empowering whoever speaks it with the notoriously masculine privilege of constructing meaning.
And limits, especially those related to stories, seem to be of interest also to the last performance reviewed: Mette Edvardsen’s Livre d’images sans images.
Livre d’images sans images by Mette Edvardsen
[Friday 26 May 2023, Teater NOR – Stamsund, Norway]
«A large, immaculate piece of paper limned by a ring of crimson cushions, a record player, a mic and some markers. A woman and a girl sitting on the milk-white expanse. An audience onlooking, heavy with gravity. «Let’s begin again». A game of words starts between the duo, an invocation of images -a recollection perhaps-, an ideation: “Between space and thing? Repetition. Between a word and the next? Pause. Between presence and absence? Theatre”».
Ph. by Bea Borgers
Inspired, amongst other works, also by H.C. Andersen’s Livre d’images sans images, aka The Moon Chronicler, which follows «a conversation between a painter and the moon, and addresses inspiration, imagination, storytelling and translation», Mette Edvardsen’s performance proposes a meteorological exercise in reversed nephelomancy (or divination by clouds) in which the clearing up of the sky verbalizes a refracted past while the fleeting shadows of sparsely accumulated silences draw a tangible present. Indeed, through the at times soothing, at times soporific non-language fabling of a satellite unhinged from its orbit, Livre d’images sans images (Book of Images without Images) draws on the luminous reflections of bygone ideas mirrored against an otherwise dark lunar terrain, holding onto unfettered stories that quickly leak away in the ink-black murk of night. And when the prestige of the voiced falls, that of silence arises, keeping things open until time is perforated again by sound.
By «working with different medias (recordings, text, voice, drawings, references, found images, loose connections, inspirations and imaginations) that do not hold together in unity», the Norwegian choreographer and performer distances herself from canonical forms, inviting spectators to follow a mercurial trace in which everything seems to talk about a loss and the need to constantly rebuild the memory of what once was so as to give meaning to what still is, intimately retying yesterday to today.
It is no coincidence, then, that the faintly outlined stage is inhabited by a mother and a daughter who bump along in their fragmented conversations, trying to hold the whole world into a shapeless embrace that still manages to contain and commingle most glimmers of humanity. Indeed, much like in Le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, where the first cultural device (aka a recipient) is elevated to the heights of a new horizon of fictionality that is inclusive -and not exclusive- of all stories and perspectives, Livre d’images sans images, too, places its focus on how «people relate to this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story» handed down from generation to generation, outside of the grasp of a canon, a fixed form, a pedestal, a norm.
As the festival days draw to a close, the audience and the artists -now a sort of extended family- all look towards the sea one last time, counting with sparkling eyes all the stories and experiences that got caught in the untangled threads of their unknowing fishing nets, and rejoice in the knowledge that Stamsund Theatre Festival is not only a cultural event or a chance for some amazing networking, but also a place in which one can easily cast a line - and fish out volcanoes.
The shows were played within 2023 Stamsund Theatre Festival
Stamsund – Norway, various locations
Witch Club Satan
by Lost and Found productions
script, music, direction and performers Johanna Holt Kleive, Victoria Fredrikke Schou Røising, Nikoline Spjelkavik
scenography Mari Lassen-Bergsten Kamsvaag
costumes Mari Lassen-Bergsten Kamsvaag, Anne Kari Spjelkavik
video scenography Lost and Found productions, Martin Losvik
sound Sindre Nicolaisen
light design Tord Eliassen
light and AV Sander Einarsen Moen
outside ears and musical contributions Øystein Elle, Magnus Børmark, Torgeir Vassvik of Nikan Siyanor (Confess)
mentor Jørn Stubberud/Necrobutcher
production Lost and Found productions
«Be Loud» is written in collaboration with Nikan Siyanor
co-producers Figurteatret i Nordland, Festspillene i Nord-Norge, Rosendal Teater, BIT Teatergarasjen, Black Box Teater
supported by Kulturrådet, Fond for lyd og bilde, FFUK, Dramatikkens Hus
Dracula
by Plexus Polaire
director Yngvild Aspeli
actors-puppeteers Pascale Blaison, Dominique Cattani, Yejin Choi, Sebastian Moya, Marina Simonova, Kyra Vandenenden
assistant directors Thylda Barès, Aitor Sanz Juanes
music composer Ane Marthe Sørlien Holen
puppet makers Yngvild Aspeli, Manon Dublanc, Pascale Blaison, Elise Nicod, Sebastien Puech
set designer Elisabeth Holager Lund
video designer David Lejard-Ruffet
costume designer Benjamin Moreau
light and stage technician Emilie Nguyen
sound and video technician Baptiste Coin
dramaturg Pauline Thimonnier
production director and booking Claire Costa
administration Anne-Laure Doucet
producer Noémie Jorez
production Plexus Polaire
coproduction Puppentheater Halle (DE), Théâtre Dijon Bourgogne – CDN, with the support of DRAC Bourgogne Franche Comté – Ministry of Culture, Bourgogne Franche Comté region, Kulturradet (NO), la Nef – Manufactures d’Utopies, Pantin, CENTQUATRE Paris, Théâtre des Quartiers d’Ivry – Val-de-Marne National Dramatic Center and Théâtre aux Mains Nues, Paris
Livre d’images sans images
by Mette Edvardsen
with Mette Edvardsen, Iben Edvardsen, Bruno Pocheron
light and technical support Bruno Pocheron, Agnar Ribe
production Mette Edvardsen/Athome, Andrea Skotland
residency support Black Box teater (Oslo)
co-production Kaaitheater (Brussels), BUDA (Kortrijk), Black Box teater (Oslo), Centre chorégraphique national de Caen in Normandie (Caen)
supported by Norsk Kulturråd
title from H.C. Andersen’s Billedbog uden billeder
Falla/Solo
choreography and performance Julia B. Laperrière
sound and performance Pia Achternkamp
dramaturgy Siegmar Zacharias
production assistant Micaela Kühn Jara
light Marek Lamprecht, Lina Bockrob
thanks to Helen Simard, Florentine Emigholz, Simone Kessler
a production of Julia B. Laperrière with Schwankhalle Bremen, with kind support of ICI-CCN Centre Chorégraphique National de Montpellier, the project is part of the culture program related to Canada’s Guest of Honour presentation at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2020, we acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Government of Canada
